


Whisper of Running Streams

by wormwood700



Category: The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-24
Updated: 2018-10-24
Packaged: 2019-08-07 03:17:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16400333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wormwood700/pseuds/wormwood700
Summary: Faramir and Barahir - and Boromir. The sense of a shared dream returning, and who is really dreaming it.  A gentle ghost story of a kind.





	Whisper of Running Streams

1.

_Someone is always there, in the little garden. Maybe they have always been, and only now making themselves felt, he doesn’t know, but he is not a man prone to delusions, so he accepts their presence as real._

 Faramir has started to go down to the garden more often in recent years, at all times of the day, to read, to draw, and sometimes just to sit in the state of mind where one is neither asleep nor awake. In the falling twilight, in the moonlight, they will be there. They are becoming an essential part of the garden for him, like the moths.  
  
It was Eowyn’s garden.   
Its creation did not run smoothly. She knew little of gardening, didn’t really possess the patience required, but had a desperate need for it to succeed that carried her forward. She had seen too much death to give up.  
She was not interested in anything formal and enclosed or anything that would fence her in, and was adamant that the garden should open on to the wild. She found her spot in the end: a long gentle slope with a reed pond at the bottom and a view towards the forests of Ithilien.  
And the garden became like she wanted, beautiful, open, but never completely tamed or predictable - a bit like its maker. She wanted fragrant plants that attracted bees and butterflies...and moths. Buddleia, red valerian, heather, cardoons, sallow ivy, knapweed, echinacea. Eowynwould relax there in a way she did in few other places. Run around with bare feet and hair loose.  
The garden was always bathed in a golden light for him those years. Their son took his first steps there, laughed there and played there.  
  
They were good for each other. They were both battle-scarred and with wounds they both knew that time would never heal. They both had inner boundaries the other could not trespass, boundaries they respected.   
Some aspects of Eowyn’s beauty were like that of moths, he thought sometimes, not obvious and something it required skill and patience to come close enough to appreciate. He had always loved moths.  
  
**2.**

Just sometimes he wished it was easier, not so many layers to work through, but open and artless like it had been between him and his brother. His brother who did nothing by half, as unreserved in his affection as in his anger, and whom he’d loved more than any other besides Éowyn, Elboron and Barahir.

Boromir, whose faults he’d also known better than any other - and the one he’d shared dreams with...  
He had felt the moment he died; his brain a cavern of echoes that slowly faded. By the turn of some inner timepiece the moment repeated itself every year at the same time.  He clung on to it perhaps, removed the gossamers of forgetfulness like a ruthless memory keeper. It was the last moment they’d shared, his last tangible, tactile memory of Boromir, other than the outline of a boat disappearing down the Anduin under the stars. Sometimes he visualised its journey down the river and out across the sea in a cocoon of slow time where Boromir continued to dream, dreams he had no access to.  
  
Eowyn fell ill one autumn, she was neither young nor very old. The disease progressed quickly, and her ending was fast. Faramir was grateful for that in some ways, grateful that his proud warrior did not have to suffer years of pain and frailty, but she left a void, in his bed and in his bones.   
The holes filled, slowly. He had so much of her around him. She was spread out, fragmented. Time preserved her there for him.  
  
**3.**

Born seven hours ago...  
Faramir cradles the delicate, fragile head in his large hands. The child opens his eyes for a second and looks at him with the blue-black, unfocused gaze of the newborn.

‘Like glass buttons in water,’ he thinks.  
He studies his grandsons’s face until long shadows are cast through the window by the late afternoon. He puts him down for a second to light a candle and looks out of the window. The moths are gathering on the glass.

Death sits with the mother next door.  
                                                            
It is dark when Elboron comes in. He stands by the door and watches his father and his son in the candlelight. Faramir feels Elboron’s eyes on him across the room. He strokes the infant’s forehead gently with his thumbs.  
What will you call him? Faramir asks quietly.  
It takes a while before the name reaches him. _Barahir_  
  
**4.**

They became very close Barahir and him. He had to grow up without a mother, and became a challenge in many ways, but Faramir found that he welcomed it. He had time on his hands and a space to fill.   
  
Barahir was plagued by dark dreams and night terrors. He would sometimes sit in his bed at night in some state between sleeping and waking, impossible to reach. All he and Elboron could was to hold him, and wait.  
He could have done with some women around him, Faramir thought at times. Instead he had to grow up among men, like he and Boromir had.   
They did their best, Elboron and him, bringing Barahir up, and he was certain Barahir knew he was loved and that he had adults he could trust and rely on, unlike Boromir and him who only had each other.   
                                                                                                      
_His memories has started to take on an added tactility during these half sleeping half waking moments in the garden, like fingertips on skin. Someone is whispering, but he can never make out what, or if it’s even words. It is as though the wall between them and he has become permeable, stretched thin._  
  
  
**  
5.**

 _He is in a grey boat on a river, muted light filtered through a curtain of mist. A man sits in front of him with his back turned and slowly starts turning his head..._  
  
Faramir woke up with clattering teeth and his hands knotted in the sheets. He didn’t get time to see the man’s face, but he would have recognised the outline of that body anywhere, and he knew that boat. He had last seen it disappear from his field of vision more than fifty years ago.   
He got up, dressed and walked slowly trough the house to his study. The house was quiet and seemed removed from his touch somehow, as if fine gossamers had been spun between his rooms and him. As if was he a ghost in his own quarters.  
When he reached his study he sat down in the chair by the window and looked out onto the moonlit terrace – his shaking hands clutching the arms of the chair. The moths had started gathering on the furniture outside. He knew that if he opened the door and went out they would settle on his hands for a few seconds.  
Boromir and he had known which of their dreams were shared by a feeling of the other’s presence. The dream he re-lived every year wasn’t a shared dream, but the memory of one. Boromir himself had gone after that first time.  
The dream he had just woken up from was different.  Boromir had been there, he knew it with the old unshakeable certainty. But Boromir was dead…  
  
There was a sound of soft footsteps and Barahir appeared in the doorway, his small silhouette rooted to the spot. Faramir cursed inside; company was the last thing he wanted.   
‘Why are you up?’ he asked, gruffly.   
Barahir looked at him; his face paper-white under the dark fringe. He didn’t answer. It struck Faramir how rare this was. Barahir usually entered his strange shadow-land if he woke up. He didn’t get out of bed. And maybe company wasn't such a bad thing just now, when he thought about it.  
Faramir lit the fire in the kitchen, made two cups of strong tea and took them out on to the moonlit terrace. He sat down opposite Barahir at the table, gave him one of the cups and lit the lantern between them.  
Faramir watched his grandson. The boy was sitting with his hands around the cup, looking alert and distant at the same time. Long black hair, pale face, slate-coloured eyes. He could see traces of himself, Boromir and Denethor in the planes of his face, but its totality was uniquely his own.   
I dreamed …” Barahir was talking into his teacup, his voice very low. Faramir jolted at the words, but Barahir didn’t look up.  
‘I was standing by a wide river; I think it was the Anduin. Someone had just left me, travelling down it.’  
Barahir looked up then, paler then ever.  
‘I think it was you.’  
Faramir met Barahir’s intense gaze. He struggled to find the right words. He didn’t want the boy to know their dreams had touched. He didn’t want to share the feeling of unreality that clung to him; that he was nothing but a dream dreamt by another.  
At last he put the boy’s hand in his and said:

‘I am a very old man, Barahir, and sooner or later we all leave.’  
  
**6.**  
Every year in the end of August Faramir and Barahir tied wine rope between the trees in the garden for the moths. The rope had been soaked in wine and sugar and hung from the branches like red spider webs.  
  
_They_  were there, as always, their familiar whispering floating past.  
Barahir was quiet, and Faramir wondered if he could hear them. He would never ask, he’d never needed someone to share the experience to prove their presence to himself.  
The moths arrived with the twilight, more than he had ever seen at any one time. They fluttered around the ropes like black particles, the swarm becoming ever denser. Then it spread wide and brushed against their hair and skin in a cloud of swirling wings. After a while they dispersed. They sat on the ropes briefly before they blended in with the darkness.  
  
‘Who are they?’ Barahir asked  
Faramir didn't say anything at first. Who indeed? He couldn’t really put it into words, but at last he said:

‘All I know is that they belong here, and belong to us somehow, and that they wish us no harm. They may be ghosts, spirits, particles, memory fragments, moths..., or all of these. And I think they will always be here.  
He took the boy’s face in his hands and said forcefully: ‘Remember that.’  
He could have told Barahir about the thinning wall between them and himself, but he didn’t.  
  
**7.**

The night has arrived and he can't sleep at the same time as he is very tired. He gets up, dresses and walks into the garden. The moths follow him as he walks down the path between the apple trees to reed pond, where they settle in a slowly spinning swarm above the water. When he leans over its black surface his reflection is just fragments of moonlight.   
He sits down and closes his eyes. The moths touch his eyelids and disappear. There’s a whisper of a running stream of water making its way towards him. It’s time to let go, time to leave. Time to let the river claim him.

  
**

  
_Muted light filters through a curtain of mist. He’s in a grey boat and darkness is about to fall._

Boromir sits in front of him and begins to turn his head. The two brothers look at each other for a long time. Boromir smiles, relieved.

‘I always knew you were behind me, but I was never given enough time to see you. When I had turned my head you were gone.’  
Faramir looks at the water rushing past; it shimmers as if a thousand fireflies are merging with their own reflections.   
  
_Who had been dreaming who?_  
Who was the sound and who was the echo?  _Or wasn’t it one or the other, but both?_  
  
He stretches his hand towards his brother. It doesn’t really matter…anymore.


End file.
